For its annual benefit concert, the Florida Atlantic...

March 30, 1988|By TIM SMITH, Music Writer

For its annual benefit concert, the Florida Atlantic University Foundation presented pianist Lorin Hollander in recital Monday evening at the FAU Auditorium. The program was novel, pairing Bach and Gershwin on the first half, Bach and Prokofiev on the second. And the playing was unusual, too.

Hollander approached all of the selections in an exceedingly serious manner, even the Gershwin. The result was sometimes uncomfortably heavy, but mostly interesting.

The Bach proved most successful. In the Partita No. 6, the pianist ignored current views on authentic Baroque performing practice to deliver an emotional, deeply personal interpretation. Rubato was rampant; tempos were deliberate; tone color was positively prismatic. None of this could be viewed as pure Bach, but I found the romanticized playing irresistible.

This style was more understandable in a group of transcriptions of Bach chorales, two by Dame Myra Hess and one by Hollander; after all, arrangements of Bach for piano invariably lose something of the Baroque idiom in the process. Hollander turned downright sentimental in his own setting of Sheep May Safely Graze, but it still worked, somehow. Sincerity always does.

The Gershwin selections -- the Three Preludes, Promenade and the early rag, Rialto Ripples -- were curiously humorless and sluggish; the pianist seemed to view them as Brahmsian.

Prokofiev`s Sonata No. 7 also was rather slowly paced, taking some of the edge off of it. But there was considerable intensity of expression here, a vivid sense of the drama underneath the strident notes and troubled rhythms.